Interested
in science?
READING
1 Look at the pictures. Say what each one shows.
2 SPEAKING Work in pairs. Answer the questions.
1 Why are the things in Exercise 1 important?
2 What was life like for people before they had these things?
3 SPEAKING Work in pairs or small groups. Discuss the questions.
1 Electricity and fire are discoveries. The other things are inventions. What’s the difference?
2 Which of the six things above do you think is the most important? Why?
3 Can you think of other discoveries or inventions that changed how people live?
4 Look at the pictures in the blog below.
1 Who are the people, do you think?
2 What do you think the blog is about?
5 Read and listen to the blog and check your ideas.
Why aren’t people more interested in science?
Welcome to my blog, where I write about the things that really interest me! This week I want to talk a bit about science, scientists and science stories.
Let’s start with Newton. We all know the story, don’t we? Back in about 1666, Isaac Newton was visiting his mother one day and was walking around in her garden. He sat down under an apple tree and started thinking. (Newton was always thinking about something, that’s what scientists do.) So, he was sitting and thinking when an apple fell out of the tree and hit the ground beside him. (Some people say the apple fell on his head, but who knows?) And Newton thought about why things fall down and not up or sideways. And he got the idea of gravity.
Nice story, isn’t it? Only it’s probably not true. Or, at least, we’ve got no way of knowing if it’s true. It’s a bit like Archimedes and the bath. You don’t know that one?
OK, so a Greek mathematician was sitting in his bath one day, more than two thousand years ago, and while he was getting out, he noticed that the water went down in the bath. So he got back in, and the water went back up. ‘Now I understand!’ shouted Archimedes – actually, he shouted ‘Eureka!’ because he was Greek, not English. He saw that the level of the water in the bath was directly related to exactly how much of his body was in the water, that this relationship was constant – it never changed! Some people say that he was so happy about his discovery that he ran out into the street without putting his clothes on. No, that probably didn’t happen either, but he had a good reason to be happy. This was a very important moment in our understanding of maths and physics.
The stories are hard to believe. But the important thing is that Archimedes and Newton really did exist, and they really did come up with those important ideas. Newton worked out that if the Earth’s gravity has an effect on the movement of an apple, then it probably has an effect on the movement of the moon, too – and all kinds of new ideas and discoveries came from that.
And you might say that these discoveries were accidents, and in a way they were – but not complete accidents. They needed people like Newton and Archimedes to do the thinking. Scientists and mathematicians do a lot of thinking and because of that, our world is the way it is.
6 Read the blog again. Answer the questions.
THINK VALUES
How science helps people
2 Tick ([latex]\checkmark[/latex]) the sentence that you think best says what the blog is about.
[latex]\Box[/latex] Some important things happen by accident.
[latex]\Box[/latex] You shouldn’t believe everything you read about science.
[latex]\Box[/latex] Scientists should be more famous than they are.
[latex]\Box[/latex] It’s important to know something about science.
2 SPEAKING Compare your ideas with others in the class.
3 SPEAKING Here are four things that science has given us. Write down three more. Then, with your partner(s), discuss the question: How do these things help us every day?
the Internet
the telephone
medicines
the fridge
GRAMMAR
Past simple vs. past contionuous (review)
1 Complete the sentences from the text with the words in the list. Then complete the rules with past simple, past continuous, when and while.
2 Complete the sentences with the correct past tense form of the verbs.
3 Sally saw an incident in her town centre. Complete her statement to the police with the past simple or past continuous form of the verbs in the list. Sometimes more than one verb is possible.
VOCABULARY
Direction and movement
1 Complete the sentence.
2 Match the phrases with the pictures.
LOOK!
Forwards and backwards are the only words here that are never followed by an object.
The words towards and away from always have an object after them.
3 Which way(s) can these things move?
1 a car
2 a plane
3 a helicopter
4 a lion in a cage